Headline Analyzer

I started blogging in 1999 before the word “blog” existed. Back then it was more like an online journal. I was a pimply high school student at the time and would write a few paragraphs about random geeky topics every day.

Law #1: Use Surveys To Find Your Readers’ Deepest Desires

So how do you write content that helps people achieve their goals and define themselves to others? Many bloggers write from their gut instincts, this is a big rookie mistake.

It is much more effective to just ask your readers about their own desires, hopes, and dreams. The biggest bloggers like Tim Ferriss do this on a regular basis.

If you have a small mailing list and are just getting started, you might not get a lot of feedback if you ask people directly to tell you their hopes and dreams.

In fact, asking people up front like that is generally ineffective (unless you have a big following) because people don’t often reply honestly with personal details like that to mass emails.

But there’s a trick you can use to get high quality, actionable feedback even from a small mailing list: use the Net Promoter System. It’s a highly effective way to get 8–10 times more actionable data than traditional surveying methods.

You simply ask: How likely is it that you would recommend my brand/product/service to a friend or colleague? (Answers are based on a 0–10 scale). That’s it.

Because it is so quick, easy and painless to respond to such a simple survey, you will find much higher response rates. After they give you their number, you ask an open-ended question: What’s the most important reason for your score?

Although you will get interesting answers here, the single biggest trick for turning passive readers into active promoters and brand advocates is in responding personally to every survey whether they give you positive or negative feedback.

If they give you a 9 or a 10 (very likely to promote), it’s the best case scenario. All you need to do is follow-up with a personalized email with a suggestion for how they could promote you to their friends (leave a review, tweet a message, etc.). Often people are willing to promote, but just need a nudge in the right direction for how to promote you.

If they give you a 1 or a 2 (very unlikely to promote), don’t fret. This is a great opportunity to learn more. Follow-up with a personal email thanking them for their time and asking what their biggest problem is so you can write more about it in the future. That way you get ideas for new things you can write about that you had not considered yet.

Law #2: Create Conflict And Drama

The most common advice to spice things up is by adding facts and data, but sometimes that will just make a post more boring. The trick to draw people in is to create conflict and add drama by telling stories.

You don’t need to be as provocative as Neil to achieve a similar result. One simple and reliable formula you can use to draw in your own readers is to open every blog post with a personal story about a problem you faced and how you overcame it or what it taught you. For an example, take a look at the beginning of this post.

Action Items:

Make a list of at least 20 hopes, dreams, fears, and frustrations of your readers collected from the action item in Law #1.

Think of 20 personal anecdotes or stories where you or a friend had similar dreams or frustrations for each one, and how you achieved the goal or overcame the frustration.

Review previous blog posts to see if you can optimize them with stories.

Law #3: Train Your Readers To Be More Active

Did you know subliminal messages are a myth? There is no scientific evidence that they work. That’s why the pre-show movie overtly shows you pictures of popcorn and coke. Because explicit messaging does work.

So if you want people to share your content, you must ask them to. If you want people to join your mailing list, you must ask them explicitly.

One of the most effective ways to engage your audience is by giving them an incentive to promote you. Virtual or physical giveaways are always a great way to make this happen.

A pro tip is that it’s usually better to give away 10 items one at a time than one giveaway with 10 items.

For example, you will usually get the same number of people to enter the contest every time (and thus promote the contest). 10 times the prizes will not get you 10 times as many contestants.

Action Items:

Make a list of 20 things you could give away: paper books, e-books, audiobooks, interviews, checklists, cheat sheets. Make sure they are hyper-relevant to your audience’s hopes and desires. Use LeadPages or similar software to have the giveaways lead directly to new email list subscribers.

Get the KingSumo Giveaways WordPress plugin to run your own contests quickly and easily. Tweets and Facebook messages give people better chances to win.

Personality quizzes are a great way to activate your passive readers. WordPress plugins like WordPress Viral Quiz make them easily to build. Add them to your blog and watch them convert like crazy.

Law #4: Create More Personal Relationships

You are more likely to actively engage with friends than acquaintances, so how do you make your audience feel like they are your friend?

One way to create personal relationships is by telling personal stories (from Law #2), but there are more techniques for creating intimacy with your reader.

For example, if I am talking to you as friends would, I would never say: “People should share the content if they like it” if what I really meant to say was “You should share my post if you like it.”

It goes against what you learned in high school, but when blogging, use personal pronouns (like “I” and “You”) instead of impersonal pronouns (like “people should do this and that”).

Another great method is to combine this with Laws #1 and #2. Engage with people through your surveys to find out their personal stories (like “please tell me your story”, not “send me stories”), and then ask permission to share their stories on your blog.

Most people will gladly say yes, and then you can share your own point of view through your customers’ stories (and even in their own words).

Personal pronouns combined with great storytelling bonds people together and creates relationships.

This should be a top goal for your blog if you want to create active subscribers and brand advocates.

Action Items:

Review your 3 most popular blog posts for impersonal pronouns (he, she, they, people, them, one) and see if you can replace them with more personal ones (I, you). This will give you a sense for how vigilant you will need to be in the future.

Call or email your 5 best customers, and tell them you just wanted to make sure they were happy. Then ask them to tell you about the last big challenge they had and how they overcame it. LISTEN. Don’t interrupt. Write notes.

Carefully read some of the popular blogs in your space and see what they do to draw people in. Do they use personal pronouns? Use QuickSprout to research their most popular posts and figure out how you can replicate that success.

Law #5: Tell Your Audience What To Do

The end of your posts will make or break how active your readers are. If you end with something typical like: “In conclusion, do X to get Y,” then your reader will happily close their tab and move on. But if you end with a call to action, then if they liked the post, they will know exactly what to do next.

A simple and effective way to do this is with a postscript.

Postscripts tend to catch people’s eye and are very hard to ignore. If you want people to share a post, you could write a post-script as simple as this one: P.S. If you know someone who makes this mistake, I’d love it if you shared this post with them. Thank you!

It’s a non-invasive way to increase the virality of your posts. You can even auto-include it on all your WordPress posts if you use a plugin like Bottom of Every Post.

If you use the SumoMe WordPress plugin, you can keep track for free of what percent of readers get to the end of your posts. On average, we find that half of our readers will read the whole post.

By the time they get there, they will be ready to take an action. You just need to point them in the right direction.

Action Items:

Think of 1 thing that has inspired you recently that wasn’t related to work, but tied into work (like Neil Patel’s 10 Marketing Techniques That I Learned From Instagram Models) and make it into a new blog post full of story and personal pronouns. End it with a P.S. that asks readers to share the post and see what happens.

Combine postscripts with the giveaways created in Law #3 to make irresistible actions for your readers to take.

Think of ways to make more content out of your most popular posts. For example, you could create slides and post them to SlideShare or record yourself dictating the post and make a podcast out of it. Then the action your readers can take is directly related to the content they just read.

Turning passive readers into active promoters and brand advocates isn’t hard, sometimes it just takes a few tweaks to make a big difference.

Try some of these techniques and see what works for you. If you discover other techniques, please come back to this post and leave a comment to help others just like you.

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As a product lead and executive for numerous successful ventures (Rackspace, HP Cloud, AppFog), Chad founded Promoter.io to help bring the actionable insights provided by Net Promoter to all businesses. He is a native Texan with a passion for helping other entrepreneurs. Get the Word Of Mouth Checklist from Promoter.io for free to help you rock the awesome advice in this post.

That is indeed a lot of information, Chad. I am a tiny blogger crawling my way to growth with my team: me, myself and I. Thanks for touching this subject because I frequently get frustrated with the lack of engagement I get on certain posts, but they seem to be my most shared ones. Crazy!

I didn’t know about this SumoMe option. I have been really thinking about switching to them…

I requested the checklist. I don’t want to forget these tips.

Taylor Paluck

@debbierodrigues:disqus I totally understand. You seem to really be devoted to your work, and I wish you the best of luck. Thank you for reading and we’ll see you at #CoChat!

I would argue that shares are definitely the best form of engagement. I’ve seen the same many times with other posts. Feel really good and the content gets a ton of traction but sometimes those don’t generate a lot of comments. As long as more people are reading and sharing I’m happy :)

Wow, these are super useful, thanks. When we started our blog we used to host a lot of giveaways, and created a lot of relationships with our readers. However, our readership became used to them and now they kind of demand it: where are the giveaways? We want free stuff! We hear it all the time…

Taylor Paluck

@borghal:disqus That can be a really hard thing to try to separate. That’s why we consistently make a download with our posts because our readers are so accustomed to them and they really seem to help them out. So they get something free but we also get to do our job and still help content marketers out! Thank you for reading!

Tara Clapper

Great post, Chad. When starting a new blog, I think it’s important to have a few go-to friends and supporters who will always help you out by critiquing, sharing, and commenting – and at least one of them should be a ‘safe’ choice, kind of like the mom that hangs everything on the fridge!

(When I started a blog that developed into its own community, my mother was actually my number one supporter! You really need that sometimes at first when there isn’t interaction.)

Taylor Paluck

@taraclapper:disqus I’m glad I’m not the only one who totally agreed with the comment about your mom being your super fan. Thank you for reading!

Thanks Tara! You make a great point and this applies to a lot of things outside of a new blog. Cultivating your supporters/community in the beginning will definitely help to jump start things. Social proof/traction is very important sometimes. Luckily it doesn’t take much.

rapidforceads

This is a wonderful information and can be utilized while blogging. However every blogger is using some strategy to post any topic to get attention of their readers but I agree that there are lots of passive readers who can help a lot to promote a blog if proper steps as mentioned in this post are taken by the blogger.

Thanks Chad Keck for this wonderful and helpful post and it will surely going to help a lot to every blogger as I feel so.

Mohinder Paul Verma BloggingFunda – A Community of Bloggers

Cathy Goodwin

Chad, these are great tips! I especially like the one about controversy. However, it’s a bit of a challenge to be controversial but still maintain professionalism – and you have to avoid any appearance of adding controversy for its own sake.

I’ve found that when you don’t have my own story to create controversy, you can borrow someone else’s! Client stories always add something and you can even borrow from the media or a popular television show. You actually get some nice traffic because people are looking for the news story!

Great post with some wonderful actionable content! Since I started putting my email optin at the bottom of my posts, I have definitely increased my subscription rates!

I will definitely be giving that plugin that adds the feature at the bottom to see if it gets me more shares!

Thanks for this!

Taylor Paluck

@myfamilyonabudget:disqus That is so great to hear. Thanks for reading. Be sure to let us know how the other plugin works for you going forward!

Alicia James

Thanks for sharing this tips Chad, I feel more enlightened.

I’m new to blogging and I’ve been looking for ways of getting more views and engagement on my blog and this was just timely. I had no idea that there were WordPress plugins that could do some magic. Getting right to them. Thanks

Alice Mumbi October

I am so inspired by this. And now I know what I should do 😊 This post is just a total encouragement to me 💯👊👌